


wide open spaces

by outwardbound93



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Flower Shop, Autumn, Homecoming, M/M, Slow Burn, Texas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-25
Updated: 2016-09-25
Packaged: 2018-08-16 16:12:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8108923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outwardbound93/pseuds/outwardbound93
Summary: “Well,” Harry says at the end of the day. The sun sets late in Texas like it doesn’t want to go, clinging to the scrubby flatlands with the last reaches of striped sunbeams. Niall leans on the broom and watches Harry fidget with a bundle of notecards he has to fill with peoples’ heartfelt sentiments. Love notes, apologies, get-well-soons, Harry’s got them all. “Will I see you tomorrow, then?” Niall props the broomstick against a shelf holding a bunch of little green plants he doesn’t know the name of. The shop is bursting with green leaves, colorful blossoms like pops of candy mixed with buttered popcorn at the movie theatre, and at the heart of it, Harry. Harry, with his languid speech and that one curl that stubbornly sticks out on the side of his head that Niall always wants to twirl around his finger and that smile that arrives in a flash or unfurls slowly. “Yeah,” says Niall. “I’ll be here.”





	

**Author's Note:**

> this one's for the the anon, the lovely tiernan, and the artist formerly known as dani nuthinbutniall who prompted me 'things you said at the top of your lungs.' i'm sorry it took so long! i hope you like it. the title is from the dixie chicks' 'wide open spaces.'

Liam brings home crinkling plastic bags full of styrofoam Taco Cabana takeaway boxes and a fistful of crumpled paper. Niall sets his guitar carefully beside the couch and slides to his feet, stretching his fingertips up to the ceiling and then sweeping down to touch his toes before he slouches over to the door to free up Liam’s hands. Liam unties and unlaces his boots to slide his feet out with a sigh of relief.

He comes home from his internship as site manager for a little house near Mopac positively reeking of sweat and sawdust and relentless Texas sun, and Niall wrinkles his nose, more than familiar with the smell now. It’s a small price to pay for the use of Liam’s couch. “How was work?”

“Good,” Liam says. A smile bubbles up on his face irrepressibly. “We’ve got the foundation in place, so tomorrow we’re going to put in the drain tile and then Monday the city’s coming to inspect, and then we get to lay down the water lines. I can’t wait.” He sounds like a giddy schoolboy, Niall thinks, like the house he’s designed and started building as part of his senior project is a Christmas present he’s getting to unwrap in reverse. “How was your day?”

“Good,” Niall parrots. He sets the Taco Cabana down on Liam’s little square table that’s pushed up against the end of the counter like a continuation of the counter. His apartment is cramped, especially with both of them living there.

The window above the sink only lets in early predawn gray light, and Niall’s blocked the other window with the burnt orange fleece throw he peeled off of the back of Liam’s couch on his third morning here. It’s quaint, and homey, and Liam’s. Niall likes it at least as well as most of the places he’s crashed over the past couple of years. 

Liam nods. He turns the faucet on and washes his hands with Dawn soap. The smell of flowers mixes with the smell of fake Mexican food, melting cheese and steaming refried beans and guacamole and sour cream in little plastic containers.

Niall waits for Liam to sit down caddycorner to him at a table with three chairs that really only fits two people before he cracks open his to-go box and unwraps the foil inside. Liam’s gotten Niall his favorite, chicken quesadillas. Niall rips the round quesadilla in half, scoops some guacamole onto it, and folds it over. The first bite he crams into his mouth tastes like the finest cuisine this side of the Mississippi.

“So,” Liam starts, unwrapping his own deluxe burrito. He’s trying too hard to sound casual; that’s how Niall knows he’s not really being casual. “Do you, like, have any gigs coming up?”

“An opening at the Cactus,” Niall answers, furrowing his brow, “a full set at the Mohawk, and one at The Hole in the Wall.” That’s spread over the span of two and a half weeks, but Niall doesn’t mention that.

Liam’s whole face crinkles with his laugh, not just the corners of his eyes and the lines by his mouth. “That’s a real place?”

Niall grins back. “Apparently.”

Liam takes a bite of his burrito and continues with the same conspicuous tone, “I was asking, er, ‘cause you’ve sort of been here for a while and, like. Not that I don’t love it, ‘cuz you know I do, but some of my neighbors have sort of said stuff about you playing guitar in the middle of the night – them, not me! – and, like, not that it’s a big deal or anything, but utilities aren’t included in my rent or anything, and obviously, you know…food isn’t either…”

Niall puts down his quesadilla on his plate. “Are you asking me to pay rent, Liam?”

“Yes?”

The way Liam looks up from under his brow squeezes a laugh out of Niall. “Shit, dude, I get it.”

Liam looks immensely relieved. “You do?”

“Yeah, like…I can’t believe I’ve been here long enough for that, is all.”

“Three weeks,” Liam says, eating his burrito with real gusto now. He speaks around a mouth full of food. “‘S not that long, dude.”

Niall scratches at the side of his nose. He dips his chicken quesadilla taco into the little plastic container of sour cream again, but slower now, thinking on it. Three weeks. It’s not very long, but it’s longer than he’d planned, longer than he’s been most places over the last year or so. Niall figures himself a tour musician because that’s the closest description to what he does, and vaguely homeless is sort of a depressing designation. He is, and that doesn’t particularly bother him, it’s just.

And there’s reasons to stay. Liam’s one of his good friends, maybe even one of his best, and Austin’s absolutely thriving with everything Niall loves. Blues on the Green is done for the summer but ACL is coming and all those late-night gigs, and there’s something about the city Niall loves. It’s not cutting and no-nonsense the way Chicago was, with its blustery winds and blowhard politicians. Austin is low and rambling and most of the people Niall’s met spreading a blanket out on the grass in Zilker Park are more than happy to talk for ten or fifteen minutes about the HEB near their house or their last trip of the summer to Schlitterbahn.

“I guess I can pick up some extra cash busking,” Niall muses aloud. “How much is rent?”

“Erm, for this apartment,” Liam tilts his head thoughtfully. “Like, a thousand a month, give or take.”

Niall almost chokes on his last bite. “What! This place – Austin’s, like, Texas is fucking huge, why is rent that high?”

Liam shrugs guilelessly. “Yeah, so. But, hey,” Liam says. He pats himself down, then sifts through the heap of plastic bags and boxes and sweating plastic Coke cups on the tabletop for the paper he’d come in with. It’s crumpled in the shape of his hand, and he hastily straightens it out on the edge of the table before passing it over to Niall.

It’s a flyer advertising help wanted. There’s a pretty neat drawing of a bouquet of flowers on the front with a sparse, _Help wanted: no experience necessary, must have an eye for beauty and be able to lift forty pounds, give or take_ that Niall reads over quickly. _If interested, call Harry._

The advertiser’s phone number is printed at the bottom and split into strips that nobody’s ripped off yet. Niall doesn’t know if the ad wasn’t up long enough or if a gig at a florist’s has some secret pitfall to it, like working at a carnival means less time on rides and more time cleaning up puke, so he looks up at Liam.

“My friend David passed it along,” Liam explains. “Look, there’s the address at the bottom if you want to have a look-see instead of calling in.”

Niall stares at the paper for something to do. ‘Course he’s had his share of temp jobs all over the country between paying gigs and having his guitar stolen on the train from Maine to New York, but it’s just – it sort of feels like moving backward, is all. Like he’s dragging his feet through the sand now instead of staying on top of it, like he’s been trying to do.

Liam offers Niall a hopeful smile when he looks up. Niall kicks him in a friendly way under the table and takes another bite of the quesadilla, and knows he’ll go have a look round tomorrow. Liam’s smile deepens.

 

***

 

Niall passes the flower shop twice before he actually notices it’s there. The address is sweating off his palm in black smudges of ink, and Niall’s reflection in the glass storefront is pink-cheeked and damp around the hairline, darkening his already dark roots. A sign above the door bears the name _Flours_ in looping cursive. Niall clucks his tongue. Austin hipsters, really.

The interior is dark, so Niall cups his hands around his eyes like binoculars and peers in through the window. The place is absolutely popping with green stuff inside: big, frond-like leaves, and vines trailing from hanging baskets across the window and down to the floor, with open-faced flowers spotted here and there like giddy children.

It’s Niall’s last chance to turn back, he knows. Probably that’s why he’s hesitating out here on the stoop like a weird plant voyeur. Niall licks his lips, wipes his sweaty palms off on his jeans, and pulls the door open. A bell overhead tinkles as he steps over the threshold, but there’s nobody stood behind the wooden counter near the back of the shop. There’s a door behind the counter leading to another room, maybe an office or the bathroom or something, so Niall folds his hands in front of him before he decides that feels too awkward.

He tries sticking them in his jacket pockets but that feels sort of suspicious, like maybe he’s going to try to pocket one of those itty bitty cacti in the tiny pots, so Niall slips his hands out again and fits them in his back pockets, instead. The wee little cacti are awfully cute, he’ll admit. There’s a whole display of them, too, three racks full of all different colors, some with sharp prickles on, some smooth-edged, soft. They remind Niall of Theo’s soft baby skin, and a pang shoots through him, stops somewhere in the middle of his chest.

“Those are great starters,” someone speaks up. Niall jumps guiltily and turns, holding his hands palm-out as if to show there’s nothing in them. “If you’re just getting started gardening, I mean.”

“No, I - I don’t really garden, I travel a lot, I couldn’t, like.”

“Oh.” The man – boy, really; he doesn’t look any older than Niall, and the curls resting gently on the tops of his shoulders make his face look so soft, his eyes very light – behind the counter smiles, a little awkwardly, and Niall remembers his manners.

He thrusts out his hand. “Niall. Horan.”

“Harry,” says the shop owner. He takes Niall’s hand in his. His palm is dry and even more calloused than Niall’s are, but less on the fingertips, not from the guitar. “Are you looking for flowers, then?”

“No, I’m, er,” Niall fumbles. The worst part about feeling awkward is that it only makes him more self-conscious, which just makes him more awkward, which makes him more self-conscious, and so on forever until Niall’s cheeks spontaneously combust. “My friend Liam said you were looking for someone to work, and, well. I thought I’d apply.”

Harry frowns. Lines pop into existence on his soft face between his brows and at the corner of his eyes, and Niall’s brain helpfully supplies, _Laughter lines._ Harry’s probably got a lot. He’d probably look really nice laughing. “I thought you said you travel a lot?”

“Well, yeah, but like.” Niall gives himself a moment to blink slowly, to take a deep breath, and to square his feet. It’s the same trick he pulls every time he goes out onstage and there’s absolutely nobody cheering, and it works like a charm every time. “I didn’t really mean to stop, but I’ve been here a while and my friend Liam wants me to pay rent, and last time I worked food service I ate, like, a lot of the food, so.”

“Do you know anything about florals?” Harry asks. A bandana patterned with tiny bees droops over his forehead, and he shifts his weight to one side, and Niall finally notices the promise of a dimple on the side of his mouth. “How about flower arranging?”

Niall huffs out a laugh. “No, obviously not. But I can learn? And I’m a really hard worker, I promise. And I’m, like, trustworthy. Um, and dependable.” He thinks he’s read that those are good qualities for job applicants to have. Somewhere. He read that somewhere.  

Harry scratches his head. It makes his bandana fall even further into his face like some kind of rocker back in the days of hairspray and skintight leather pants, and a tiny fragment of a lyric worms its way into Niall’s head, something about _I got my first real six-string / Bought it at the five and dime._ “Honestly, like,” Harry admits, “I guess that’s okay? I’ve never really done an interview before. Um, do you have, like, references I can check with? Or, like, I dunno. A resume?”

“No.” Niall stretches the word out so long the tips of his ears start flaming again. “Um, I can give you my friend Liam’s number though, he’s local. Or, like, my high school transcript? Um, actually, I’m not sure how to, like…do that. I can find out,” he offers quickly.  

“Ah,” Harry says seriously. “We’re a mess.”

He startles a laugh out of Niall. “D’you think we can just start over?”

“I’m not sure I’ll do any better,” Harry admits readily. He gives Niall another, closer once-over. “You’re an indie, like, granola hipster type?”

Niall tries to scoff, but it comes out closer to a laugh. “C’mon! This isn’t even my jacket, really.” He won it in a game of pool so, well, technically it is. “And, I mean, yeah.”

The corner of Harry’s mouth curls up into a smile. He looks a bit like the Cheshire cat, and also maybe sort of frightening, with his soft-looking lips and soft face and how Niall can’t look away from him or his ringed hands for more than a few seconds at a time. He flips up a section of the counter on its hinges to make his way out from behind.

He’s wearing the _most_ hipster jeans and a pair of battered leather boots. He’s sort of hard to make sense of: part rock star, part farmer in that oversized flannel he’s wearing, part hipster, too. Back home in Chicago there are weeds and flowers that pop up in the cracks between slabs of pavement, and Niall’s always thought they seem too out of place for him to look at very long. Harry looks disjointed and a little ill-placed, too, but in a way that Niall’s entirely comfortable with. In a way that feels familiar, relatable.

“I love granola,” says Harry. “I guess we can give you a shot, then.” He gives Niall his first real smile, a lazy thing that grows across his face until suddenly it’s framed on either side by deep dimples like parentheses, his eyes crinkling, and Niall smiles back. He couldn’t help it if he tried. “It’s quite hard, though. I’m just warning you now.”

“I can do it,” Niall says. He’s not even quite sure what the job entails, but he’s never not been able to do something he put his mind to. Except not fuck up his knee, that is.

“We’ll see,” Harry says. His smile feels like a promise.

Niall takes a detour home that night with a little skip in his step. Sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint the moment when you started feeling like things weren’t going to go your way, and then something happens – like getting a job with a guy who’s smile runs as deep as the Grand Canyon – and it’s like a break in the clouds. Niall swings by Amoeba Records before he heads back to Liam’s just to be around the music. Sometimes they have little tiny live gigs on the little stage in the back, but Tuesday evening shows the shop to be quiet, almost reverential in its low hum. Patti Smith warbles over the speakers and the records in their dusty sleeves smell as much like home as Niall’s ever known.

It’s a bit like being a library, Niall reckons, the shelves lined with familiar voices and familiar stories. He doesn’t have the cash for any new tunes, but he adds a couple of new releases to the wish list he has going on the back of a Sonic receipt and stuffs it back in his pocket, then hustles out the door to make it home in time to greet Liam. He doesn’t have enough cash for a new record but he can afford burgers this time, especially since he’s got a job now.

And it’ll make Liam happy.

“Of course you got the job,” Liam says over a spectacularly healthy dinner of Chik-Fil-a and sweet tea. “You’re great, Nialler.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Niall says, though he can’t quite force his smile down out of his eyes.

Liam sucks at his straw and traces the straight edges of the burger wrapper in front of him like he’s outlining the layout of a house. “So when’s your first day?”

“Tomorrow,” Niall answers. “I’ve got to be there early, at like eight o’clock. I haven’t woken up that early since high school.”

“Well, you’re being a productive member of society now,” Liam says.

Niall objects, “I was productive before – am now, I mean. I used to cook, that’s feeding people. And busk sometimes, that’s not nothing.”

Liam backtracks, “Okay, I said that wrong. I mean, it’s for someone else.”

Niall’s argument dies on his lips. _Does_ he do all that for himself?

“Let me know if you need a ride,” Liam goes on. “I can drop you on my way to the site.”

Niall says, “Sounds ace,” and thinks about music, and building houses, and flowers, until he falls asleep.

 

***

 

Liam drops Niall off at Flours before Harry’s there to open the shop on Wednesday morning. Niall sits down on the curb to wait and rubs his palms together for warmth. Texas can be brittle cold in the mornings, but by midday, Niall’s liable to have gotten sunburnt. It’s not as bad as Chicago’s sudden temperature swings, or the way fog moves over San Francisco like a cold, damp blanket, but it’s not exactly fun, either.

He fishes his harmonica out of his jacket pocket – army green, this time, not that he’d put particular thought on not wearing the jean one, it’s just what he grabbed on his way out, seriously – and cups his hands around his mouth. Blowing a warbling little tune into the mouth organ has the dual benefit of amusing him and keeping his hands warm, so Niall plays with his scales for a bit. He segues into a quick schoolhouse version of “New York Minute,” and he’s just getting started on a meandering tune that reminds him of the deep grays and blues of the east coast speeding by from a train when Harry hurries up the sidewalk.

“Sorry, sorry,” he says. His breath leaves him in a puff of condensation and he keeps one hand pressed over his heart, like he’s worried about it pumping out of his chest. “Parking sucks with school back in session and I noticed that the geraniums were looking a little droopy, so of course I stopped for a chat, and then I thought maybe I should fertilize the beds some, so I did that, by the time I was done it was time to water the crabapples, which I know most people say are out of season and not really worth the time now, but they’re the best thing for mother’s day, so I like to keep mine around year to year, you know, like a family tradition, and –”

“Harry,” Niall finally cuts in, “Harry, it’s alright, really. I don’t mind.”

Chest still heaving, Harry fumbles his keyring out of his pocket and moves to unlock the flower shop door. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” Niall says. He stands up and brushes himself off, surprised to find Harry watching him. “Seriously, it’s alright. I don’t mind.”

Harry worries over his bottom lip. Niall really wishes he wouldn’t. Partly it’s because Harry really has nothing to worry about, and partly because the way his white teeth press into his full lip and drain the color out draws Niall’s eye with irresistible force. “It’s just, the last person I hired, Sarah, couldn’t stand it…”

“Lucky for you, I don’t have a lot else going on,” Niall shrugs. Then, with a gentle hip-check that feels way more daring than chatting up any beautiful girl at a bar, Niall says, “Why don’t you let us in?”

Harry spares Niall a dazzling smile, and then he tucks his chin to his chest, and Niall’s first day of work begins.

Harry was right. It’s a hell of a lot harder than Niall thought it would be. He figured he’d stand at the till and manage transactions or maybe sweep, but Harry has him hauling compost out back and loading it up in huge trash bins onto the back of Harry’s truck, picking weeds out of the trays of potted plants he has both at the front of the shop and in the back, where there always seems to be a stray bit of ribbon lying about underfoot waiting to be slipped on.

And it’s not like Harry’s slacking, either. If he’s not up front rearranging flower arrangements, then he’s in the back filling orders, or cutting bits off flowers to grow more flowers – honestly, how’s that meant to work? – or answering the phone.

They’re not quick, businesslike phone calls, too. Niall listens to Harry natter on to “Betsy, love, hi,” about what flowers are in season and what colors are “in” this year and whether to hang her wreath on the front porch for the neighbors or on the back for herself when she’s out with the grandkids, and whether UT stands a chance of winning the conference this year. It’s like that with just about everyone who calls.

Niall finally gets a chance to ask him about it at lunch. Harry finally had mercy on him at about 12:30, flipped the OPEN sign on the door to BACK IN 30, pocketed his keys, and led the way across the street. The pizza joint they’re sat at is called Home Slice. Harry accepted his menu from the waitress with a “Hi, Bethany, good to see you,” and a sweet smile.

“I thought I knew a lot of people,” Niall says. His arms feel like tenderized steak, he lifted so many plants this morning. It makes Niall wonder what Harry’s arms look like under his loose flannel. “Seems like you know everyone.”

Harry shrugs. He picks the mushrooms off his pizza only to put them back in incrementally different places. “Just here,” he grins. “You travel – I’m sure you know a wider spread, is all.”

“Maybe,” Niall nods. He does but it sort of feels different, is all, with Harry turning around in his seat to say hello to the old guys playing bridge at the next table and introduce Niall with a wink to one of them that pinks up Niall’s cheeks. “Liam’s the only person I really know here, though. And you.”

“How’d you know Liam?” Harry asks.

“His family came to Chicago for a holiday one summer. I was busing tables and working the bar when we were short-staffed, and I slipped him a couple of rum and cokes to make him look older for this girl he’d fallen in love with,” Niall rolls his eyes fondly. “We stayed in touch.”

Harry narrows his eyes at Niall, the corner of his mouth twitching. “See now,” Harry says, in his slow, southern drawl, “should I be worried about why you didn’t list that job as a reference for me?”

Niall laughs. “Please. I’d have given you Sully’s number, you’d never have gotten off the phone again.”

“Love at first ring?”

“More like he’s spent too many years listening to drunken sob stories,” Niall grins. “Somehow everybody ends up pouring out their hearts to him.”

Harry nods slowly. “I get that. You know, I do, like, funeral flowers, too. And weddings, of course, and baby showers, and bridal showers. But I do. I get it.”

Niall chews on the side of his thumb. “Yeah, I – when I was a kid, I’d do bar mitzvah gigs, and weddings, too, and sometimes, like, wakes. You know, string stuff. Sad-sounding sorts of things.” He’s a hair away from telling Harry about plucking out amazing grace for his nan’s funeral that last blazing summer in Chicago, but he stops to ask himself why he wants to, and he stumbles to a halt.

Chewing his straw, Harry muses, “You’re not a sad sort of flower.”

“There are sad sorts of flowers?”

“Sure. But you’re, like, different. I don’t know. Maybe a perennial.”

Niall scratches his earlobe. Harry’s full attention seems to come with a sort of weight that presses on Niall like a magnifying glass. It makes him squirm. He likes it. “Is that a good thing?”

“They’re all good,” Harry says, like _duh._ Niall snorts on a laugh. “You ready to go?”

“Sure,” Niall echoes, and Harry bites his lip and looks away.

This time, when they head back into the shop, Niall takes care to listen to Harry’s side of the conversation. It must’ve been lonely for him in here to listen to relatives reeling with loss, asking him what kind of flowers he thought they’d like best, as though he was meant to know. It makes sweeping up Harry’s cuttings and putting his bundles of fresh-cut flowers into metal buckets of ice that much more enjoyable for Niall.

“Well,” Harry says, at the end of the day. The sun sets late in Texas like it doesn’t want to go, clinging to the scrubby flatlands with the last reaches of striped sunbeams. Niall leans on the broom and watches Harry fidget with a bundle of notecards he has to fill with peoples’ heartfelt sentiments. Love notes, apologies, get-well-soons, Harry’s got them all. “Will I see you tomorrow, then?”

Niall leans the broomstick against a shelf holding a bunch of little green plants Niall doesn’t know the name of. The shop is bursting with green leaves, colorful blossoms like pops of candy mixed with buttered popcorn at the movie theatre, and at the heart of it, Harry. Harry, with his languid speech and that one curl that stubbornly sticks out on the side of his head that Niall always wants to twirl around his finger and that smile that arrives in a flash or unfurls slowly.

“Yeah,” says Niall. “I’ll be here.”

 

***

 

September gives way to October like time is on fast-forward. Niall helps Harry around the shop and minds the till when he has to tend to other things, which he describes vaguely as “working, Niall; should this hibiscus go here or here?” with an indistinguishable change in the flower’s position. The better Niall gets at keeping the store clean and the succulents at the front of the store alive, the more responsibility Harry lets him have, till one rainy Thursday morning Harry asks him to come help set up for a wedding.

He’s pulled up in front of the shop in his rumbling flatbed truck. It’s a rusted blue affair with a hubcap missing off the back tire and a set of velour dice hanging from the rearview mirror that Harry swears he can’t remove. A coffee stain patterns the front seat like a birthmark and a foot of Diet Coke cans rattle around in the footwell, and when it rains water slips through the AC system and blows cold into Niall’s face, and Niall sort of loves the thing. Harry lets him drive it to the dump across town sometimes on Friday evenings, and sometimes he even rides along, and they crank down the windows and blast Miley Cyrus loud enough to properly embarrass themselves.

“There’s, like, a lot of setup,” Harry explains. He chews his bottom lip.

“Oh, okay,” Niall hops to his feet. He gives himself the usual brush off and thinks, not for the first time, about bringing a chair to work with him to wait for Harry. “Do you need me to grab anything from the shop?”

“Nah, everything’s loaded in the bed,” Harry says. He jerks a thumb over his shoulder, and Niall spots the ragged red tarp drawn tight over the truck bed. Jesus, if there’s enough flowers in there to fill the whole thing…

Niall climbs into the passenger seat without kicking out too many of the Diet Coke cans. Austin’s pretty strict on littering. “Do I get paid extra for this?” Niall quips. He glances over to Harry, who’s white-lipped with his hands curled around the steering wheel. Niall leans over to jostle a laugh out of Harry with his elbow.

Harry rubs the tender spot on his ribs Niall just jabbed his elbow into and says, “No, but if we close this account without anything going wrong, I’ll buy you lunch.”

“You buy me lunch all the time anyway.”

“I can’t help it, you look so pitiful. Skinny, like a little paperback book that fell off the shelf.”

Niall pauses. “You’re really nervous, aren’t you?”

Harry shrugs, then nods. “Weddings, you know?” He glances at Niall. “Special day.” Harry pulls the truck over after just a few minutes on the road. Niall doesn’t think anything of it at first – Harry gets lost almost as often as Liam does – but then Harry pulls the keys out of the ignition and goes to open his door.

“This is it?”

“Yeah, this is it,” Harry says. He swings his legs out and hops down to the pavement. Niall scrambles out of his seat to follow.

He tries to find the right words. “It’s, like.” It doesn’t look like much, honestly. It’s just a two-story off-white clapboard house on a side street in Austin. Had Niall been driving, he’d definitely have passed by without stopping. Except, oh, wait. There’s a big shiny trailer parked against the curb, too, with the name Salt Lick Catering emblazoned on the side. There’s a steady trickle of people running back and forth from the street around the back of the house carrying everything from candlesticks to – good lord – actual living doves in cages.

Niall catches up with Harry at the back of the truck. He’s already loosened up the cable ties holding the tarp on, so Niall helps him pull it over and aside. He wads it up and shoves it through the passenger-side window without bothering to roll it up. Harry would just ask him why if he did, and then look at him with that froggy blank stare when Niall explained it was so that nobody would steal the truck. People don’t steal cars in Texas, apparently.

Harry and Niall start by unloading the heavy wooden crates first. Niall takes a peek inside one and finds it full of tall glasses; flower vases for the tables, most likely. They’re separated by pieces of cardboard, so at least Niall doesn’t have to worry about scratching them against each other. Harry makes lifting the heavy crate so easy, 

The backyard is much bigger than Niall expected it to be, especially coming from his neighborhood of Chicago, where the houses sit squashed together like birds in a row on a power line, and his dad used to mow the pocket-sized lawn with a hedge-trimmer. This back yard is big enough to fit half a football field. An open-sided white tent straddles a low-growing tree strung up with twinkling Christmas lights. Tables pour out from inside the tent, and Niall’s brain boggles a little at the math. This is no sweet backyard wedding; this is, like, a proper hoedown. Or whatever southern people call a big party.

Niall turns to Harry to ask him if hoedown is the proper term just as Harry catches sight of something over Niall’s shoulder, flushes a light dusty pink at the top of his cheekbones, and tucks his chin into his collar. Niall glances back over his shoulder for a look.

There’s a guy very definitely walking toward them. His cinnamon-brown hair is cut into the latest version of the punk rock side-swoop. His hollow cheeks pull his half-smile taught across his face, and a day’s worth of stubble speckles his jaw like a fine dusting of chocolate powder on top of whipped cream. He looks a bit like an alley cat, for all of that, his blue eyes rimmed in something hard.

An ex-boyfriend? Harry’s never mentioned one before but he probably can’t look like that and not, ‘cept Niall thought maybe he was the girlfriend type, not that he couldn’t do both, it’s just if Niall knows he likes boys, then –

“Well, well, well,” says the guy. He draws to a stop in front of them like a train pulling smoothly into the station. There’s a clipboard tucked under one arm and an earpiece wire trailing beneath his collar, and Niall readjusts his grip on the heavy box in his hands. He wishes he could set it down, or that he wasn’t so red-faced with the strain, or that he could think of something to say, maybe even something witty. “Look who we have here. Our very own Harold Styles and the secret little prize he’s been keeping in his flowery sex dungeon.”

“Who’re you calling little?” Niall asks, then, “What?”

Harry looks positively pained. Once Niall notices that he’s smiling, too, the protective part of him stops weighing the pros and cons of launching this heavy ass crate at this smug ass guy. “It’s a flower shop,” Harry corrects him, his face pink, his brow furrowed. “And I’ve not been keeping him a secret.”

“Well, then why haven’t we been introduced sooner?” he asks. The guy holds his hand out to Niall, says “I’m Louis Tomlinson,” and waits patiently for Niall to set down the crate of glassware he’s holding so they can shake hands.

“Niall Horan.”

Louis gives a little nod of approval, which shouldn’t please Niall as much as it does. “Nice. Irish-sounding. I don’t suppose –” he starts, but then his earpiece starts buzzing so loudly that Niall can hear it from three feet away. Louis waits for the person on the other end to take a breath, then cuts in with a smooth, “Francie, I hear you; the veil isn’t how you imagined it, so now you’re worried that your eyes have been deceiving you about everything else, too. That’s totally understandable. Why don’t we see if we can get the tailor to come in and adjust it for you, and then you can think about redoing everything else? One thing at a time, okay, love, and I promise, whatever you decide, I’m with you.” He listens for a moment, nods, and then all’s quiet again. “Jesus, thank Christ that was easy. No way in hell am I planning this wedding all over again.”

Niall tilts his head. Harry supplies, “Louis’s an event planner – weddings, but also, like, parties, and corporate retreats, all that kind of stuff.”

“I even got my old boy Harry here this account, so,” Louis gives a pointed look to the crates sitting packed at their feet.

Niall cracks a grin without meaning to. “Bit of an asshole, aren’t you?”

Louis laughs. “Definitely. Alright, get to work, then, and let me know if you need anything. Seriously, Harry,” Lou puts his hand on Harry’s shoulder. Niall doesn’t miss the way Harry leans into it. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

“For the sake of your reputation, it better,” Harry grins weakly.

They’ve only got a few hours’ time to set up, so Niall lets his mind go blank and buzzing with work. He and Harry start by unloading the truck’s contents into the shaded area behind the house so the flowers don’t go all wilted and sad before the wedding even starts, broad Texas heat beating down on them in spite of the fact that Halloween candy is on sale at Target for six bucks a bag. (Niall and Liam might’ve eaten their way through a few of those while sharing a joint on Friday nights over a game of football.)

Once they’ve got everything out, they start with the table centerpieces. The vases are about as tall as a wineglass, which isn’t so tall at all, but it fits the flowers. Harry – or the bride, maybe – picked out bundles of hydrangeas and baby’s breath. They look a bit like clouds of condensation on a much colder day, sweet and refreshing. Harry bundled them up before he loaded them into the truck, so it’s a simple matter of filling each vase with some water and that powder stuff that makes flowers live longer, then cutting the twine that keeps each setting bound together and plopping it into the vase.

After that, Harry starts with the purely decorative flowers. A low staircase leads from the back of the house to the grassy area where the vows’ll happen and the tables are set up. Harry has Niall wind trailing ivy-like flowers around the banister and railings while he wanders around placing flowers anywhere he thinks will look nice (which means pretty much anywhere).

Niall’s hot and sort of disgustingly sweaty by the time he’s done, so he goes to find Harry and ask if maybe they can order lunch, or if he’s got a bottle of water. “What the fuck are you doing?” he asks instead, when he spots Harry trying to shimmy up the tree growing in the middle of the open-sided tent. He’s double-fisting bundles of roses and looking, for all the world, like this oak tree’s just broken his heart.

“Don’t you think these would look great, like, at the top?” Harry asks. “With the lights and everything?”

Niall has to admit, “Yeah, probably. But you’ll kill yourself if you try to climb up there.”

Harry gets a speculative look in his eye. “Niall, -”

“No.”

“If I do it, I’ll die. If you do it, I’ll buy lunch.”

Niall rolls his eyes and sighs and pretends not to look as easy a sell as he is. “You were gonna do that anyway,” he mumbles, and lets Harry boost him up so he’s straddling a branch. It turns out to be fairly easy work, placing the flowers where Harry wants them. It’s not till they’re huddled in the shadow of Harry’s truck in the little strip of grass between the sidewalk and the road that Niall asks, “So, Louis…?” He meant to play it cool and wait, and instead he’s asked just as soon as they sat down.

Harry rearranges the bell peppers on his Jimmy John’s sandwich just so. “One of my best friends,” Harry says.

“He’s sort of,” Niall starts, stops. They just seem so different, is all. Harry with his slow southern drawl and collection of loose flannel shirts and headbands, and Louis with his smart suit trousers and that haircut, a look in his eye like _watch me._ Like a challenge.

Although maybe that’s not being entirely fair. Niall’s done his fair share of overtime the past few weeks. The school year struck and brought with it high school homecomings, and these weird ass things that girls wear called mums. They look like bundles of ribbon waterfalling from centerpieces the size of Niall’s head, some are so big, but Harry says all the kids wear them, so he’s been working like a madman placing flowers in the center and threading them through the ribbons like bits of ivy winding up the side of the girl’s dress. Niall is privately, eternally grateful that he didn’t have that on top of everything else when he was in high school.

So he’s had the chance to watch Harry so focused on his work that he didn’t even hear Niall calling his name, his back hunched over the work station in the back giving himself back problems and too little sleep just so that some high school girls can have the mum of their dreams. It’s a wordless, buzzingly intense Harry Niall wouldn’t have imagined existed when they met.

“He came into the shop one day when I had just opened looking for flowers for his girlfriend,” Harry says, a little smile curving his mouth into something Niall wants to press his palm and neck and face against. “He wanted to buy her roses but those are so – you know?” Harry asks, like Niall will get it. He nods. He does. “So I asked him about her instead, and he was so…” Harry shakes his head. “You should’ve seen him before. He put the UT Tower to shame.”

Niall asks, “What happened?” though he figures it can only be a few things.

“She graduated, and moved, but he wanted to stay.” Harry shrugs, wrist-deep in the long, thick green grass that grows all over Austin, soft and supple, as if daring someone to uproot it. “It happens.”

“Huh.” A strange quiet descends over them as Harry picks out the last of the veggies in his sandwich and Niall licks the mustard and mayo from his fingertips. Niall hasn’t thought about moving on in a long time, but suddenly Harry’s reminded him of it, like maybe Harry’s been thinking about it. Niall swallows and tries hard not to wonder why.

They finish setting up the flowers they brought for the tabletop arrangements just in time to clear out before guests start arriving, but Harry has one last surprise up his sleeve. He hauls out a big clear plastic tub full of flower petals, all sorts, hydrangeas and hibiscus and rose and lily and things Niall hasn’t learned the name of yet. It’s not till they’re leaving them up on the guests’ seat in place of handfuls of rice to shower over the newlyweds’ heads that Niall realizes it’s Harry’s version of a bridal gift.

Louis supervises it with a supercilious eyebrow. “You might as well stay to see the full effect,” he tells them, finally. “You won’t get the same thing out of pictures.”

So that’s how Niall and Harry end up tucked away at a table on the fringes of the party, dried sweat on their skin mixing with the sweet perfume of early autumn air and the light, powdery fragrance of flower petals. There’s a dance floor set up beneath great overhanging branches strung up with twinkle lights, and part of Niall is thinking about the light like warm honey on Harry’s skin and the blond highlights in his hair, the rough drag of his callouses against Niall’s threadbare Stones t-shirt. Another part of him is content just to stretch his legs out and knock his toes against Harry’s, Harry smiling back at him languidly.

It’s the push Niall needs to ask, “Does it ever bother you that, like, when this is over, the flowers might go home for a bit or be pressed, maybe, but then they’ll get thrown away? Like, you have to cut them, but you know that means killing them.” He laughs, a nervous thing warmed by the low hum of happy weddinggoers’ voices and Stevie Nicks’ warbling tenor over the speakers.

“No, not really,” Harry says. “If I left them at the shop or in the nursery, nobody would see them. And then they’d die anyway, but they wouldn’t have made anyone any happier.”

Something clicks into place in Niall’s head. “That’s what you do,” he says. He doesn’t mean to say it aloud, but it doesn’t feel like there’s anything he can’t say like this, surrounded by the blue velvet of a Texas sunset and the bubbling champagne of things to celebrate. And Harry.

“Yeah,” Harry says, and nods slowly. “I’m the flower guy.”

It’s not quite what Niall would’ve said, but he’s not wrong, either.

 

***

 

Texas clings stubbornly to the end of summer. The air smells fresh and ripe, and there’s a light breeze stirring the air no matter where Niall goes, like a promise of things to come; but for right now, it’s all frozen, time teetering between the scorching, lazy heat of midsummer and the sweet relief of fall. It feels like tanning by the side of the pool under warm sunshine until the sun goes down and a wet, cold chill takes its place, urging Niall inside to the pounding spray of the showerhead, a day-old slice of pizza, and deep, dreamless sleep.

He’s fast asleep when his phone jolts him awake, rattling around the bedside table blaring a tinny rendition of Phil Collins’s “Can’t Stop Loving You.” Niall gropes for his phone, one eye cracked open, and answers it mostly asleep. “Hello?”

“Niall, honey,” his mom starts.

Niall sits upright on the couch, his heart pounding. He knows that tone in her voice. “Mom? What’s wrong?”

“It’s your Grandad, honey,” his mom answers, still in that tone of voice that says _everything is alright_ so fragilely that Niall’s breath stutters in his chest. “He’s gone, baby.”

For a long, long moment, Niall can’t think of anything to say. He’s dimly aware of the fleece blanket drawn over his lap and that his neck aches from the position he’d been sleeping in, and that he’s still got potting soil caught under his fingernails, but mostly his mind is on the past.

He remembers Nan showing him how to bake red velvet cupcakes and sneaking his samples of the batter and icing all the while, and sitting him in her lap when he was just old enough to see over the steering wheel so he could pretend to drive, and squeezing onto the narrow bed beside him when he stayed over and telling him stories about ghosts and porcupines that she made up off the top of her head.

Grandad’s there on the fringes, showing up long after Niall’s dad grew up and moved out, to fix the mailbox that Niall knocked over one of the first times he was learning to drive and at his Nan’s side when they visited Niall’s house. He’s never been much more than a peripheral figure, and the size of the hole in Niall’s heart is small enough that he feels sort of ashamed of it, like he shouldn’t feel quite so relieved that it wasn’t someone more important.

Mostly, Niall’s thinking of visiting Nanna’s house, and of the way it smelled, pot roast simmering in the stove and his grandad’s spicy cologne and the love Nan directed at him like a spotlight. And he’s not _not_ sad at all.

“Will you come back for the funeral?” his mom asks.

So, naturally, Niall says yes.

He waits till seven to call Harry, and fills the time between now and then by taking a shower and contemplating his meager wardrobe. All he’s really got is a few pairs of blue jeans, a bunch of battered band t-shirts, and a jean jacket. He’s just wasting time, really. Niall knows that he’s still got a funeral suit at home hanging up in his childhood room and that he hasn’t grown enough that it won’t fit.

Funeral clothes are a bit weird that way. You buy them knowing that you’ll probably only ever wear them the one time, since who wants to be caught at a wedding or a fancy party in a suit they wore to bury someone they loved? And then someone else dies, and the old funeral clothes come back out of storage as if they’re another old friend or long-lost relative. They say _I’m sorry for your loss_ and _Such a shame_ and _Well, see you at the next one,_ all at the same time.

Niall makes a cup of coffee and leaves it to chill on the counter while he calls Harry. His socked feet are positively freezing on Liam’s tiled floor. Harry picks up with an, “I’m awake, I’ll be on time, I promise,” that drags a smile out of Niall.

“Take your time,” Niall says. “I just wanted to let you know I’m gonna be out of town for a few days.”

“Oh?” Harry asks. “Where are you off to?”

Niall toes at the edge of sunlight creeping into the still and quiet room. “Chicago. My step-grandpa just passed away.”

Harry’s “Oh” sounds far sadder this time. “I’m so sorry. Take all the time you need. Is there – can I do anything for you?”

Niall shakes his head before he remembers that Harry’s not there, can’t see him. With his eyes closed, he can believe they’re standing around the shop bullshitting. Niall would be sweeping the immaculate floor, and Harry would be needlessly rearranging a bustle of flowers. “Nah. It’s okay. We weren’t really close, or anything. But I figured, like. It’s the right thing to do.”

“Of course,” Harry says. “Come back whenever you’re ready.”

Niall leaves his eyes closed as sunlight edges up his face. He feels warmer already. “Yeah. Will do.”

His flight departs at twelve-thirty. Liam offers to drive him, but Niall takes the bus, instead. It’s good practice for going back to Chicago, he offers, stuffing down the real reason like a kid hiding their favorite teddy down the front of their shirt. He just doesn’t want to make this seem like a _thing,_ when it’s not, really. He’s probably making it into a thing just by pretending so hard that it’s not, though.

Maura’s waiting blithely at the airport in the front of a line of cars blaring their horns, demanding that she moves. In typical Maura fashion, she puts the car into park and pulls Niall into a quick, tight hug, then pops the trunk so he can load the messenger bag he packed with a stick of deodorant, an issue of _Cracked_ magazine, and an extra pair of jeans.

“You look so good,” she tells him, practical and serious and deeply, deeply Niall’s mother. “Tan.”

Niall breathes the scent of her perfume and her usual pine-flavored car freshener and relaxes against the seat. “Yeah,” he admits. “You look good too.”

“I’m old, and grieving, but I’m not stupid,” Maura rolls her eyes. It makes Niall laugh and reach over to hold her hand on the middle console, her palm already flipped up and waiting for him.

Maura drives them to Bobby’s house. They’ve been divorced for eons, feels like, but then there’s moments like these, where they forget how they fell out love and become each other’s most needed sidekick again.

Niall meets and re-meets relatives he forgot he had, and some he hasn’t seen in ages, and still others who weren’t born last time someone in the family died or got married. It’s a bit strange, really, the way the house in mourning also feels a little like a house celebrating. Maybe you can’t have one without the other.

Amongst the near-constant outpouring of casseroles and cakes and pies and batches of brownies that neighbors and old friends and friends of friends bring for the grieving family are huge flower arrangements. Niall doesn’t get a chance to look at them until he’s milling about the wake with his relatives, making conversation about football and next year’s Superbowl, his heart aching somewhere in one of its side rooms.

Fragile-looking metal tripods hold the wreaths and bouquets, and Niall checks the cards for something to do. Most are from relatives or old friends of his grandad’s that Niall doesn’t know. One of the biggest and most ostentatious has forget-me-nots tied in, a touch Harry would appreciate. The note on the back jostles the hurt to somewhere else in Niall’s chest. _I’m so sorry for your loss,_ in Harry’s untidy scrawl. Forget-me-nots, Niall thinks. As if he ever could.

The funeral itself happens quickly, with surprisingly little fuss. He had his affairs in order, apparently, but even if he hadn’t, Niall thinks he might’ve been surprised. There’s a sequence of events in place for when people die (cleaning out his house, paying first his bills and then his surviving children, treating his body and informing the papers and the priest at his church, and ordering his tombstone. It all makes death seem a lot less mysterious and a lot more like business, really. It’s not quite unemotional, it’s just a fact. Life continues on.

They bury him on a Sunday morning, misty and cold, the rustling wind making sure Niall can’t forget that this is Chicago, not Texas. Multicolored light shines down through the scenes depicted in the church’s stained glass panels, and Niall thinks about how the bursts of color look a little like bouquets while the deacon reads a passage about death being natural. Most of the churchgoers go home. Niall and his family form a procession of cars to the nearby gravesite, where the deacon reads yet another passage about mourning.

And that’s it. It’s not as scary as Niall thought it’d be, he muses. He and his mom are standing at the curb waiting for Greg and his wife, Denise, to pick them up. Last time Niall was here, he remembers being proper frightened, though he’s not quite sure of what. He doesn’t really go in for guardian angels or even ghosts, like the church would have him believe, but this place doesn’t feel special for being the resting place for his Nan and now his Grandad. Feels like they never really made it here, anyway.

Chicago in the autumn is all fire colors and cold wind. The wind blows red and gold and orange leaves off the trees and down the street, and Niall thinks, longingly, of the heat and green in Texas, the fact that he can sit outside on Liam’s balcony or at the park with a cold beer and relax into a warmth that never seems to fade away.

“Are you going to stay?” Maura asks. The line of cars in front of them accelerates so slowly as people return from the graveyard to move theirs out of traffic and maybe go get lunch, get laundry started for the week, hit the gym before it gets too busy.

“Nah,” Niall says, as friendly as he can.

Maura seems surprised. “You seem so happy there,” she comments, and Niall realizes she means Texas. Before he can correct her, Greg and Denise pull up, and Niall moves to open Maura’s door for her, and the moment is lost.

He gets back on the plane to Austin feeling relieved in a way he can’t explain, like there’s been a cord pulled taut between him and Liam’s smelly feet and the shitty traffic of I-35 and Harry’s flower shop, and only now does the line go slack.

Niall takes his phone out of his pocket and shoots Liam a quick text saying he’ll be back soon, and then he messages Harry a brief, _thank you_. His phone buzzes before the flight attendant even has the chance to tell them to turn off their electronics; Harry’s sent back, _You’re welcome._ It reminds Niall of their conversation outside the wedding venue that time, when Niall was trying to tell him something. “ _I’m the flower guy,_ ” Harry’d said. It wasn’t quite what Niall meant, but it was true. And so is this; Niall is welcome.

He looks at the text for a long, long moment, and then he turns on airplane mode and sinks into his seat and waits to arrive.

 

***

 

Niall’s not waiting on the curb at half-seven like he wanted to be, to surprise Harry. He had to drop Liam off at work, instead, and then it took him ages driving around downtown to find a parking spot that wasn’t metered and capped at four hours, so Niall’s running late on his first day back.

It’s not even been a week; he doesn’t know why he’s so eager to get back to the shop full of flowers that make his nose itch and his eyes water, where Harry talks too slow and half the stuff he says only make sense ‘cuz Niall’s there for the other half he doesn’t fill in. Still. He trots up the walk, listening to birds chirp in the trees and the cicadas quiet their usual chorus as the sun rises – later, now, till daylight savings’ time kicks in – and thinks about picking up lunch from the Shake Shack near the Alamo Drafthouse on Lamar. God, with any luck they’ll be having a Star Wars special, or something.

Niall’s pushed the door open, set off the bell ringing overhead, and crossed the store to the counter in the back when he notices the boy sat up on the counter, swinging his heels against the solid wood so that they make dull _thuds._

“Um,” the boy says, stilling. He’s not a boy, really, but he’s so skinny, and his eyelashes are so thick, he doesn’t make Niall think of his dad at all, so he doesn’t quite look a man.

Hesitant, for some reason, Niall asks, “Who are you?”

“I’m Zayn,” he answers. His eyelashes really are ridiculous. He holds his hand out to Niall after a beat, good southern manners kicking in, and Niall looks down. His fingertips and palms are smudged with pencil marks and his nails are bitten down to the quick. That’s what does it for Niall, his poor scraggly fingernails; Niall looks at them and feels a sympathetic twinge in his own bitten-down fingers.

“Niall,” Niall says, and takes his hand.

“Oh, you’ve met,” Harry says, waddling through the door to the back with a loaded pallet in his arms. He sets down the pallet on the counter and Niall peers in curiously.

Pumpkins. “Where the fuck did you get pumpkins?” Niall asks. His poor back.

“Aren’t they beautiful?” Harry asks. He reaches in and pulls out a perfectly misshapen pumpkin. Harry sighs happily. “I love fall.”

Niall glances at Zayn and is surprised to find him glancing back with probably the exact same look on his face: one part exasperation, two parts fondness. Niall flicks his eyes away and clears his throat as quietly as he possibly can.

“Oh, right,” Harry says. “Zayn, this is the Niall I was telling you about – no sense for colors, of course, but he’s got a good eye for petal shapes – trust me, Niall, you do – and Niall, this is Zayn. He works here now.”

The matter-of-fact _he works here now_ draws Niall up short, for reasons he can’t explain. “Yeah?” he prompts. In fact, he and Harry had a conversation like this, once. In the front seat of Harry’s car, parked somewhere on the drag so Niall could watch UT students hustle across campus, or mill about on the green, or read. It’s not something he’s done, and he doesn’t particularly miss it, it’s just. It’s like touching the edge of an alternate universe: a life he knows he could’ve had, but didn’t.

He’d asked Harry, “I gotta know, bro, the name; what’s with that?”

“What?” Harry had asked, his mouth stained cherry red by a Sonic slushy. “Oh, Flours?” he laughed. “It’s a pun, you see? It sounds like flowers, but it’s spelled like, you know, ours, as in ‘yours, mine, and ours.’”

Niall struggled with that. “Yeah, but it’s, like, terrible, man.” Harry laughed again, his head tilted back, bare throat tanned and warm-looking in the late summer light. “It sounds like the name of a bakery, maybe.”

Harry sighed. He had a way of sighing that didn’t sound so much like exasperation as it did patience, like he was reminding himself not to get too ahead of himself. “I’d like that,” Harry admitted. “And there’s some walls I could take out. But that’d be, like, a real expansion, and so far, you’re the only employee I have.”

“It is kind of nice,” Niall had admitted, more to himself than Harry. “Except your shitty accounting system, I mean.” It’d only taken one long, long weekend to get that sorted out. (And most of a bottle of fireball, and two pizzas.)

“But if you’re not growing, what’re you doing?” Harry asked, reaching out to touch the soft petal mouth of the lantana he set on the dashboard.

And it’s just. Niall went away for a few days; he didn’t know he was getting left behind.

“He applied,” Harry answers defensively, a smile teasing the corners of his mouth.

Zayn coughs. “I was the _only_ one who applied,” he tells Niall, with a conspiratorial sort of grin, and Niall grins back even as his stomach locks up tight around the granola bar he splashed down with half a Gatorade this morning.

Harry turns to go back to the back room of the shop, so Niall ducks quickly under the counter and follows, leaving Zayn sat on the work surface with the nub of his pencil scratching gently against his notepad.

“He seems sweet,” Niall ventures lowly. He catches up to Harry at the part of his shop where all the neat mason jars and old wine bottles and other makeshift vases are kept till Harry fills them with his flowers.

Harry leans against the shelf, his green eyes hooded. He always looks best surrounded by his flowers, Niall thinks. The pink blossoms bring out the faint flush on his cheeks, and the tender green stems match the color of his eyes, and everything else just adds to him, somehow, the bursts of blue and violet and red and white like cherry syrup and chocolate shavings on top of ice cream. He’s a bit like one of his own bouquets, Harry; every time Niall thinks he’s seen enough to understand, he notices something he never saw before.

Worrying his bottom lip between his thumb and forefinger, Harry says, “He is. I’m glad you’re back, you know, the shop was too quiet without you. The plants missed you.”

Niall asks, “The plants missed me?”

“Yeah, you know, they get all sad and wilty when nobody’s talked to them for too long.” It’s not Harry’s intent, but a little spike of sorrow goes through Niall for Harry’s sake. “Besides, like. After all those mums this year, and that wedding account, and the bride referred us – Flours, I mean – to some of her friends, it was like. And the last time I placed an ad, I got you. Figured it was worth another shot, you know?”

It’s all the things Niall was sort of hoping Harry would say, in his roundabout way, but somehow it doesn’t feel quite right. Niall got off the plane at Austin-Bergstrom International so eager to get back to all the things that’d become familiar, and suddenly they don’t feel so familiar anymore. He’s not sure why that bothers him so much.

“Good,” Niall finally says. “It’s good, I’m – I’m glad, and,” he goes on, watching Harry study his expression and wanting to make him happy, “I bet the plants feel real loved.”

If people could glow, Niall thinks, Harry would. “Glad you’re back,” is all he says, then, “I have so much work for you to do.”

Zayn’s not a bad guy to work with. He takes over most of the meticulous lettering stuff on the cards that go in the flower arrangements people have sent to other people, and he makes most of the deliveries, too. Niall knows it’s a huge weight off Harry’s back, not least because he’s the worst driver Niall’s ever met. Sometimes Niall comes back from a run or a trip to the post office or the grocers to find them talking quietly with their heads tucked close together, but it never feels awkward, really.

So Niall’s not sure why he feels so unsettled, still. Part of him starts to worry that maybe he shouldn’t have left, or worse, he shouldn’t have come back.

 

***

 

Niall’s crunching toast over the sink to catch the crumbs one morning when he hears the distinct sound of Harry’s rumbling truck pulling up to the curb, followed by a quick _beep BEEP beep_ that makes it unmistakable. Niall chokes down the rest of his toast with half a mug of water out of a coffee mug. He’s just setting it in the sink when Liam hustles out of the bathroom in a pair of athletic shorts, his Nikes neatly laced.

“I can’t believe you’re still wearing shorts in October,” Niall says, thinking of Chicago in the fall, and how he doesn’t even really miss the colors. It still feels like summer in Texas, like Niall’s wandered into a bubble in time, where nothing ever really changes and nobody comes or goes. It’s not the worst thing.  

“Me neither,” Liam laughs. Then, “Fierce chicken legs, Nialler.”

“That was them, we should go,” Niall says, studiously ignoring Liam.

Zayn’s standing on the curb outside with a lit cigarette between his first and second fingers, a scowl on his face scored on like etchings. His face brightens when he spots Niall and Liam trotting down the stairs from Liam’s apartment, and he even greets Niall with a half-hug. He smells like smoke and greasy diner food and last night’s drinks, and Niall holds on longer than he means to, it’s such a friendly, familiar smell.

“Is this Liam?” Zayn asks, with a tilt of his chin.

Niall opens his mouth to respond but Liam smiles in a way that’s all soft and warm, like cookie dough eaten out of the bowl with a spoon, and downy kitten fur, and says, “Yeah. You must be Zayn.” He holds his hand out.

When Zayn smiles, there’s a little hint of – of something that doesn’t ordinarily come out around the shop between Harry’s puttering and Niall’s upbeat whistling. If Niall had to take a guess, he’d say they just took a shine to each other; it strokes the prickly feathers of Niall’s unease.

Zayn switches his cigarette to his other hand in order to take Liam’s outstretched palm. “You look familiar,” Zayn says, narrowing his eyes thoughtfully.

“We’ve probably seen each other around campus,” Liam explains.

Zayn blinks slowly, and smiles, and says, “I think it was McDonald’s, like, freshman year.”

Liam blushes. “You bought me a burger. Jesus, I – dude. Thank you.”

Zayn’s tongue presses up against the back of his teeth and he looks about five years old, and all the fear Niall had that Zayn was somehow the cause of whatever’s up with him floats away. Niall’s heart feels a bit like a hen at the minute, and Zayn’s just gone and rolled another egg under Niall’s wing.

Niall trades a look with Harry, who somehow manages to fit all the things Niall was hoping he’d understand onto his dopey sweet frog face. “When you’re done killing your lungs,” Harry calls from the driver’s seat, “we can head out.” Niall climbs into the truck and scoots over on the bench seat to make room for Liam and Zayn, who pile in. The passenger door just manages to swing shut on their narrow hips.

It’s just as unbearable as Niall should’ve figured it would be, with Zayn and Liam starting up a conversation about each other’s comic book tattoos, Harry’s leg bumping against Niall’s every time he has to pump the brake or gas the old truck, Austin waking up around them with the easiness of a river turning a water wheel. Sunlight glints off the mostly still surface of Lady Bird Lake as Harry takes the Riverside exit for Zilker Park.

Zilker Park is shaped sort of like a racetrack, with roads all around and hiking trails leading down to the lakefront, and green space in the middle. It seems too small to hold Austin City Limits in a few weeks, but maybe that’s just part of the illusion of Texas. Niall is always setting out for a quick trip to the record store or for a haircut or to the thrift shop on Guadalupe only to have been on the bus for twenty minutes and still be half an hour away on foot. It’s like there’s so much space in Texas that people have to fill it with sheer blind confidence that they’ll make it.

Harry parks the truck on the edge of the greenspace and digs up a football from beneath his truck’s bench seat, and then he and Niall and Liam and Zayn start trekking to a spot deep in the middle. Niall was right. It’s bigger than he thought it was.

Louis’s embarrassingly practical Nissan pulls up behind Harry’s truck and he ambles out with a dog on a leash and a baseball cap turned backwards over his cinnamon hair.

“Are you ever not late?” Zayn asks pleasantly as soon as Louis’s within earshot.

“If you weren’t bumming rides off of the scarecrow over there, you’d be even later,” Louis responds, in the same even, pleasant tone. He and Zayn fistbump. “And who’s this?” Louis asks, turning his attention to Liam. Liam’s knelt to muss Louis’s dog’s fur and get his face licked all over, and Niall watches the muscles in his shoulders tighten, bristling at Louis’s tone.

Liam rises to his feet and puffs his chest out like he’s meeting someone on the job site. “Liam Payne.”

“I’m Lou,” Louis answers, a half-smile tugging up one side of his mouth. “I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about me.”

“I have,” Liam says, his voice stern and a little cool. Niall wonders how he and Louis can have gotten off to such a rough start, and then he notices that they’re still holding each other’s hands, and he has to try very hard not to roll his eyes.

Louis grins and presses, “All of it good, I presume.”

“None, actually,” and Liam finally cracks, bending forward with a laugh. His face scrunches up and Harry has the good sense to look a little abashed and Niall and Zayn manage not to crack up at the look on Louis’s face, and just like that, it’s like someone snapped an elastic band around them.

“I call QB,” Niall breaks in. “And Liam on my team,” he tacks on, so they all fall into arguing over who’s on whose team. Niall’s not even sure what the lineup is when Liam finally cocks his arm back and hurls the ball down the field and Louis and his dog, Bruce, go tearing off after.

The grass smells fall-sweet, ripe like apples pulling down the boughs of an apple tree, and the sun beats down less like a ten-foot wave and more like a gentle swell. Niall tries to play carefully because of his knee, but he crashes his shoulder into Louis’s when Louis tries to snatch the ball out of his hands and passes it along to Liam, who hurls it over to Harry, who does a little dance like they’ve just completed a touchdown.

Louis’s a brash player, all sharp elbows and crisp comments like the first sip of a Jack and coke. Liam would much rather keep the ball in motion between them, always trying for these long tosses that Zayn seems afraid to try to catch, his smile goofy. Harry runs about underfoot “accidentally” tripping them as often as he can with his flailing octopus limbs.

Zayn’s not even holding the ball when Liam tackles him off his feet, laughing all the while. Louis climbs onto Harry’s back and directs him down the field, shouting “Touchdown! Field goal! Go go Longhorns!” with complete conviction. They’re the worst team Texas has ever seen, and Niall loves it.

Zayn calls for a timeout with his hands on his knees, his poor smoker’s lungs wheezing. Harry flops down on the grass at his feet so Zayn lies down next to him, and that seems like a good idea, so Niall settles into the soft, cool grass to catch his breath, too. Liam sits down and leans back on his hands, smelling sweaty and familiar, and Louis comes over and nudges the rest of them with his toes before he settles in, too.

Without their giddy shouts of laughter and the breath sawing in and out of Niall’s lungs, the quietude of Zilker Park creeps back in like a sunset. It draws out the colors of crickets chirping, and construction across the river on a new apartment complex, and the drone of a plane overhead. Niall lets out a sigh and closes his eyes, the better to hear it. Sunlight turns the insides of his eyelids bright red and highlights the faint roadmap of his veins.

That aching, unsettled thing in Niall’s chest gives another twinge, and he frowns, unsure of what to do with it. Maybe it’s grief, and it’s just taken this long to sink in. Some part of Niall thinks it must be something else, though. He sighs as quietly as he can and cracks his eyes open.

A strange, lonesome hill rises in the middle of the park with a sheer cliff face on one side. It’s the closest thing Niall’s seen to a mountain since he came back from Chicago, and it gives him a little moment of pause to see anything except a tree or a building breaking up the endless horizon. Here there’s nothing but wide open spaces, the flat earth yawning up to an unbroken sky; it should feel empty, but somehow it doesn’t.

Niall listens to Zayn’s breath smooth out and the rustle of Louis’s and Bruce’s restless legs. Liam smells like the apartment they share: boy and sweat and cologne. One of Harry’s stray curls tickles Niall’s cheek. In that moment, it’s enough just to exist.

Eventually Louis says, “Lunch, boys?” and Harry says, “The botanical garden is, like, right over there…” so Louis and Liam head off to start day-drinking and Harry and Zayn and Niall make plans to catch up with them when they’re done at the gardens, and the afternoon stretches out into evening in an unnoticeable procession of time. Niall doesn’t feel empty at all.

 

***

 

Halloween falls on a Monday, and even though they all know they shouldn’t, the Flours crew and Louis and Liam still spend it drinking four dollar shots on 6th Street. Louis thinks that a bar crawl is just about the best idea he’s ever had, so after downing his second Four Horsemen of the evening at the fourth bar they’ve stopped at, Niall’s head is swimming. Harry’s there, though, keeping up with him even if he’s clinging to his shoulder for support, and it’s so hard to want to stop Harry from laughing, flushed and happy, in his face, his makeup smudged around his mouth. So Niall doesn’t.

He catches glances of Liam dancing (“No, no, I really – well, if you insist,” with a smile at Louis that made the tips of Niall’s ears burn), of Zayn chatting up a girl at the bar, handsome even in his leather vest and chaps, and of Louis throwing his arms up and doing a shimmy on the dance floor just to make Liam smile. Niall pulls Harry after him and they join in on what has to be some of the most uncoordinated dancing The Gatsby has ever seen, and that just makes it all the better. They all know they’re going home together, as a group, so the pressure to hook up is off; it’s a bit of a shame, because Niall knows he looks a bit like James Bond in his thrift shop suit, to be honest.

Niall’s memory of things gets hazier as the night wears on. He remembers more uncoordinated dancing, the soft warm press of Harry at his side up at the bar, Zayn’s hands on his hips for an uncoordinated waltz, the glitz of the chandelier at some bar or another, Liam tucking him into a hug and near tears about how much he loves him, the sweet relief of a drunken piss in a bathroom playing Coldplay over the speakers.

Then, somehow, he’s sitting outside on the curb eating a slice of greasy pizza from a paper boat. Harry keeps swaying into traffic and Zayn keeps reeling him back in. Niall rests his head on his knee and closes his eye just for a second, and the next time he opens them, his head’s on Zayn’s shoulder while they totter down the street. Zayn calls to a couple making out against a wall to “Get the fuck over here before you get arrested,” and Liam and Louis stagger into the light of a streetlamp. Niall tries to cheer for them and ends up retching a little, and Zayn readjusts his grip on him, moving faster.

Harry comes into focus. He carefully watches his feet like he knows he can’t trust them, and Zayn’s and Niall’s double shadow falls across his face, plunging Harry into a dramatic chiaroscuro of light and dark.

Like he can feel Niall’s eyes on him, he looks up and smiles. He gives his great big megawatt smile, the one that makes him look like a little kid, all laughter lines and too-big front teeth. Niall’s heart tries to escape his chest. “Magical night, innit?” he asks. He’s still smiling when Niall looks away, his cheeks burning.

 

***

 

The day after Halloween brings the first real chill of the season. Niall’s too hungover to enjoy it for the rest of the week, and then Harry shows up to work the next Monday with his hair tied up in a bun, the tip of his nose flushed pink against the cold. Niall picks his head up off the heel of his hand, an undeniable little note of pleasure struck through him like he’s a plucked guitar string.

Harry sets a heavy crate of freshly cut flowers down on the desktop. “Would you mind running the shop today?”

“‘Course not,” Niall answers, going through the wooden crate full of sunflowers. He’s always surprised by how big sunflower stalks are. Harry always says sunflowers are “overpowering,” so he can only put one or two in each bouquet. There’s been a rusted metal bucket full of sunflowers for two dollars each on the counter at the shop for so long now that Niall’s started greeting them like friends in the morning. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, I’ve just got some planting to do,” Harry says, with a tight smile.

Niall narrows his eyes. “You wouldn’t have spent all weekend in the garden, would you?”

“No,” Harry says defensively. “No, I – of course not.”

Niall picks a sunflower out of the crate and drops it onto the floor. “Oops,” he says. “Would you mind picking that up for me?”

Harry scowls, and glares, and then he shuffles awkwardly into a crouch so he can reach without bending over.

“Christ’s sakes,” Niall sighs. He takes off the embroidered _Flours_ apron and hangs it back up neatly on the hook on the wall. “Let’s go.”

“The shop –” Harry starts, so Niall says, “Zayn will be along in an hour to open. It’ll be fine. You, however…not so much. C’mon, c’mon,” he says, poking Harry in the sides. He starts laughing even as his shoulders slump, and he leads the way back out to his truck.

The oldies station is playing Lynyrd Skynyrd on the way to Harry’s, so they crank up the radio as loud as it can go and sing along to “Sweet Home Alabama” at the top of their lungs, _“where the skies are so blue.”_ Niall laughs breathlessly at the end, the infinite Texas sky stretching on forever in every direction.

Niall’s never been to Harry’s before, which is strange, now that he thinks of it. Harry’s been over plenty of times to pick him up or hang out before they head out, and they’ve all spent a drunken night or two at Louis’s, though his place is enough of a sty that it’s no one’s top pick (except maybe Liam). Niall figures out why when they’ve been trundling along the Southwest Parkway for twenty minutes. Austin fades into the rearview mirror quickly, leaving just scrubby brush and short, fat trees that spread shade in half-moons on the shimmering blacktop.

“We’re close,” Harry assures him.

“You make this drive every day? No wonder you’re always late.”

Harry laughs. “No matter how early I wake up, I just can’t seem to leave on time.”

“What time d’you wake up?”

“Oh, like four-thirty.”

Niall’s mind boggles. “In the _morning_?”

“There’s a lot to do,” Harry says amiably. Niall thinks of Harry passing out on his shoulder at their booth in Applebees while they’re waiting for their food to arrive, and during the previews for whatever movie’s playing at the Alamo on South Lamar that week, or during their lunch breaks, and a little pang of sympathy shoots through his chest.

“Christ, buddy,” Niall murmurs. “I should’ve offered sooner.” He’s not sure why he didn’t think about where, exactly, the flowers came from. It’s not like they’ve been getting regular deliveries from anyone except Harry, after all.

Harry steers the truck off the highway. Side roads cut through the Texas wilderness like tears in the seams of a shirt; you can only see them for an instant, but if you keep moving, they disappear. Farmland lies on the other side of the highway: acres and acres of cotton, same as has been growing for centuries, the seed pods bursting in the heat and shedding cotton fibers across everything like a fine layer of gloss. “You’re smiling,” Harry says, the corner of his mouth pulled up.

“So are you,” and Niall reaches over to press the pad of his thumb against Harry’s dimple. Harry smiles harder.

He turns off on a side road called Tortilla Flat – “Like the book?” “The name, yeah; everything else, not so much,” – and up a short driveway. Harry’s house is a little one-story thing, not as big and sprawling as most houses in Texas are. The eaves and shutters are painted a warm, faded yellow, and an old weathervane points its beak in the direction of the breeze. Niall shudders, grateful for his hoodie, and follows Harry up the walk.

The garden in front of his house is absolute and total chaos; bushes and vines and pops of flowers shoot up with seeming abandon. Harry notices Niall looking and explains, “Just seems like they should get free reign sometimes, is all,” which is just Harry enough that Niall nods. He likes it, same as he likes Harry’s orderly shop and his bursting arrangements.

Harry leads Niall around the back of the house, where there’s a sprawling flowerbed. There’s another, smaller planting bed hemmed in with a low fence up against the back wall of Harry’s house without any blooms – a vegetable garden? But it’s the greenhouse that really catches Niall’s attention. It’s not big or magnificent, and he can see that it’s even missing a few panes of glass, but the explosion of color inside is so demanding ( _look at me, look at me_ ) that Niall’s breath catches. It’s like looking at whatever magic shines out of Harry at just the right moment, only it’s _there,_ so close Niall can touch it.

“So, like,” Harry starts. “Mostly I need help with the planting. And some harvesting. And some hardening-off to get started.” He bites his bottom lip, again.

Niall remembers that first conversation he had with Harry. He wasn’t going to back down then; he won’t very well quit now. “Okay,” he says. “Where do we start?”

Harry puts him to task in the outdoor flowerbeds, which he’s helpfully already hoed and fertilized. It smells, fittingly, like cow shit. A steady, gentle breeze keeps the smell from knocking Niall out, though, and he sort of likes the work. It’s dirty and smelly and he’s never going to get all this soil out of the whirls of his fingerprints, and when Harry harvests these flowers for the shop, Niall will get to know that he did that. He helped.

Harry supervises from the greenhouse, where he’s busily _snip-snipping_ with a pair of cutting shears that make Niall real nervous to see in his hands. He hasn’t cut his fingers off yet, though; Niall’s got to believe Harry’ll be fine. “We’re going to grow daisies and snapdragons and dianthus and alyssum this year,” Harry enthuses. “You know, most winters, it’s like big, right, you want a big bouquet of warm-colored flowers to offset the cold. Not this year.”

“Yeah?” Niall prompts him. The knees of his jeans are stained and wet, and he threw off his jacket hours ago so now his sweat has dried and cooled tacky and cold on his skin, and he can feel the deep burn of real, good work.

Nodding, Harry says, “This year the next big thing is a lot of small things.” He pauses, then adds, “Which I have you to thank for, really.”

Niall sits back on his heels. “Me?”

“Yeah, you know,” Harry shrugs. He’s sat on a stool, his ankle hooked around the leg. Niall allows himself a moment of – of selfishness, it feels like – and thinks that he looks just as beautiful as any flower. Stray curls brush his temples and his jaw, and there’s a high flush set on his cheeks, and a light layer of sweat like dew.

“Just, cuz, like. I don’t know.” He gives a little nervous laugh. “Like, I don’t know. I was at the nursery looking at the seed catalogue and, like, thinking about what I wanted to do next. And I was looking back and thinking about the past few months, and how in all the brightest moments, you were there.”

He’s desperately avoiding eye contact now. Niall doesn’t know what to say. Nobody’s ever told him they loved him like that before.

Harry plunges on, “And I thought, like, that’s what these flowers can do, you know? A great big roaring fire is nice and all, but it doesn’t keep you warm when you’ve got to go and run for the camera or make some hot chocolate, you know? I think, like,” Harry bites his lip. “I think maybe that’s what we can do – as florists, I mean. Like, a little light, here and there.”

Niall clears his throat. “That – yeah, that sounds –” he’s not sure what it sounds like. He tries to say something, then stops when he realizes he doesn’t know how to answer. The old string around his heart gives a yank, and Niall touches his dirty hand to his white shirt. “Yeah,” Niall says, finally.

“Yeah,” Harry murmurs. Then, “Are you done with that? Will you help me with the seedlings?”

Niall nods and finally moves into the greenhouse. The smell hits him first, super-sweet and powdery, like there’s pollen sticking to the inside of his nose already, and warm. He starts sweating again immediately. Harry might have a house but Niall knows this is his real inner sanctum. It makes him real careful not to damage anything he’s not supposed to.

On a table in the back of the greenhouse, Harry has a low card table piled with trays of plants. Each seedling is in a pot of soil about as big as a can of soda, and there must be hundreds of them. Niall whistles lowly.

“I’ve been keeping these guys cool in case there’s a frost this weekend,” Harry explains. “All that’s left is to get them planted. There’s that sector in the field opposite the house – yeah?”

Niall nods. Yeah, he noticed the spot.

Gardening is hard work; Harry wasn’t kidding about that part. The back of Niall’s neck is turning red in spite of the chill in the air, and his calves and thighs and biceps and back are positively achingly sore, and the sweet feeling of satisfaction doesn’t go away. You’d think it would get boring, or rote, but instead Niall falls into the rhythm of it with a feeling like relief. It makes him think of Harry and his bright moments, and Niall knows he’ll remember this as one.

The last thing they have to do is finish cutting. Harry cuts the bits that he’ll use to make more flowers – honestly, that still sounds insane – and Niall he leaves to carefully cut the stalks from blooming plants. They come in all shapes and sizes and colors, and when they reach Harry’s workshop, they’ll be made into something extraordinary.

“So, you’ll be ready to do this again in a couple of months?” Harry asks, laughing, as he pulls shut the greenhouse’s flimsy wooden door. Evening has settled over the countryside while they were busy inside. The sky doesn’t burn up in shades of yellow and red and gold like it does on the West coast, and it’s not as drawn-out as East coast sunsets are, either. More like the velvet curtain of deep blue night is pulled up to the chin of the horizon, and left peeking over the top are gentle hooded eyes of periwinkle and violet.

The feeling comes over Niall suddenly and violently, like he’s just rocketed up on a theme park ride. “I love this place,” Niall blurts, and snaps his eyes over to Harry, biting the inside of his cheek.

“Yeah,” says Harry. “Me too.”

 

*

 

Harry opens the back door to his house without unlocking it, which makes Niall shake his head. People don’t break in in Texas – of course not; people leave their doors open for ‘em. The back door opens into a brightly lit kitchen with faded white cabinets and bunches of flowers on every flat surface in vases made out of an old watering can, a rain boot, and a coffee can. Pots and pans dangle from a rack hanging on the ceiling, and a three-tiered set of hanging baskets holds fragrant garlic and onions.

Niall takes a deep breath. “Smells good,” he says. He’s glad he can’t smell himself yet.

“You can go on in if you like,” Harry says. “I’m just going to change my shirt.”

“Have you got a bathroom?”

“Oh, yeah. First door on your right, down the hall there.” Harry points, then ducks into what must be his bedroom.

Niall passes through the living room on his way to the toilet. It’s a tidy, surprisingly airy room. A green velvet sofa faces the bank of windows to Niall’s left, and there’s a little TV sat on a low table in the corner like it doesn’t get used much. There’s a record player on a bookshelf heaped high with all sorts of stuff: almanacs, a thesaurus, _The_ _Lord of the Rings,_ some Bukowski, and a bunch of issues of Good Housekeeping among others. Harry’s record collection is fit into a milk crate. Niall spots Elton John, Hanson, and Joni Mitchell right at the top. It’s a weird collection of junk that’s precious because it’s Harry’s home, and Niall likes it.

Niall uses the toilet and washes his hands, then his face. He dries himself off with the hand towel on the counter’s edge. When he puts it down, he realizes he was right; there’s still soil trapped in the pattern of his fingerprints.

Harry’s nowhere to be found when Niall wanders out of his bathroom, so he drifts into the living room. The sofa looks cozy, as does the armchair, but Niall’s distinctly aware of how dirty he is. So Niall settles onto his back on the shag rug set in front of Harry’s couch, instead. He’s so tired he could go for a nap right here.

“Niall?” Harry calls. Niall listens to the floorboards creak under his weight as he approaches. “Good God, I’ve killed him. Poor baby. One day’s manual labor, and –”

“Shut the fuck up,” Niall laughs and cracks an eye open. Harry’s stood at his feet in his tatty old jeans and a fresh blue t-shirt, and the weird lasso strangling Niall’s heart gives a bizarre tug.

“How about dinner?” Harry asks. His two front teeth press into his bottom lip, and Niall wants to laugh and choke at the same time, it’s such a taunting visual. “I can cook.”

Dinner. Food. Niall’s mouth waters. “I can help –”

“I’m just going to make you spaghetti,” says Harry. Then, gently, “You’ve done enough.” He pads across the floor and flips through the records swiftly, assuredly. “What are you feeling more, Eagles or Carol King or First Aid Kit?”

Niall whistles lowly. Tough choice. “Carol,” he decides. His ma used to listen to her all the time on Sunday afternoons. She’d shoo the boys out of the house and get to work with the broom and the bleach, and Niall would play on the swing set outside or with the neighborhood boys down the street, and be able to hear Maura’s music from the house’s open windows. Niall lets out a deep sigh.

He hasn’t thought about his family in, well. A while. It doesn’t hurt like he expects it to, like it used to. It’s not that he’s not still sad that Nan’s gone, and Grandad now too; more like the grief has found a place to live between things bursting with life and color, like Liam’s laughter in the middle of the night on a snack run, or Louis’s frantic jerking the controller every time he loses his nerve in Halo, or the sweet and sour kiss of sharing a cig with Zayn on a night out.

And there’s the city, too. The inescapable crush of I-35 traffic, the seething hot perfume of exhaust and gas on the air, and Stubb’s weekly concert spilling over the tops of the wooden walls like a siren’s call, and the faint orange lights of UT Tower burnt onto the horizon. There’s a greasy slice of pizza from Home Slice and friendly dogs and friendlier folks visiting Zilker Park and flashing familiarity of 6th Street.

Harry pads back into the room. Niall registers something cold and wet pressed against his knuckles, and he knows it to be a sweating beer without taking a look. “Bless your heart,” Niall groans. He’s thirsty; he’ll prop himself up on an elbow to take a swing in just a second. Niall waits for Harry’s steps to betray his retreat, but nothing happens.

And then there’s a palm settling over Niall’s chest. Harry’s palm spreads over Niall’s sternum, the tips of his fingers brushing the lines of Niall’s ribs. Harry breathes fast, and Niall can imagine his bottom lip caught between his teeth, faint lines drawn around his eyes. Then Harry’s warm breath spills over Niall’s chin, his mouth, and Harry presses his lips against Niall’s.

He kisses gently, lightly, like the layer of bubbly sweet froth on top of a malt. Niall tips his chin up to follow when Harry pulls away, and he’s rewarded with the shadow of another kiss on the bow of his lips. They hardly touched, but Niall feels rubbed raw by Harry’s stubble and the electricity rolling off his skin. He wants so much _more_ , but he curls his hands into fists instead of reaching for Harry and leaves his eyes shut. If he sees Harry knelt over him, his curls hanging in messy curtains on either side of his face, his lips wet, there’s no way he could let go.

Niall forgot Harry’s hand on his chest till he leans up into it, and he realizes Harry must be able to feel Niall’s heart pounding against his palm. Somehow, his heart just starts beating faster.

“Dinner’s in ten,” Harry says. Niall cracks his eyes open just in time to see him leave the room, and he touches his lip wonderingly, his heart still rabbiting all the while.

 

***

 

Somehow, Liam convinces Niall that to be a real Texan he has to watch Friday Night Lights, so he and Liam and Louis and Zayn and Harry take to squeezing in an episode on Saturday mornings no matter whose place they crashed at the night before. Now that Niall’s had an invitation, he finds himself spending a lot more time at Harry’s place, too, sometimes tending garden, sometimes listening to the records Niall picks up used just to find out if they’re any good. They cook together, too, making use of the vegetables grown from Harry’s garden.

“You’re dating,” Louis announces one evening over Taco Cabana and Dos Equis.

Niall scowls. Liam’s not even home, Niall doesn’t know what this asshat’s doing here. “No, we’re not.”

“Okay, but you wish you were.”

“No, just – no. Stop. La la la, I’m not listening.” He claps his palms over his ears.

Louis grins his cleverest grin, and when Niall doesn’t move his hands, Louis wrestles his wrists down. “Yes, you are,” he pants. “You want my help.”

“Go to hell.”

Louis huffs. “I can see you’re really open and invested in –”

“Shut up.”

“- this relationship, so I trust things’ll work out for the best, but –”

“Go home.”

Inexorable as rain at a wedding, Louis continues, “nothing’s going to happen till you make it, so –”

Niall escapes out the front door. He doesn’t realize how chilly it is until his bare feet hit the cement walkway of the second story walk-up, and then he shivers, hugging his arms. His breath leaves him in a puff of condensation, and Niall watches headlights sweep over the dark officefront of the lawyer’s practice across the street. He wishes he had a smoke.

Louis opens the door to his apartment just a few minutes later. “Sorry,” he grants Niall magnanimously, then, “but I’m dead serious.” He hands Niall a pack of Marlboro special blend and his favorite Iron Man lighter.

Niall shakes a cancer stick out onto his palm and cups his palms around the tiny flame to suck the cigarette to life. “I know,” he finally sighs.

Quietly, like he’s worried about someone overhearing him, Louis says, “I want you both to be happy.”

It’s just the kind of heartfelt thing Louis sneaks in between witty comments like a blade between the ribs. It cuts deep, puncturing his heart, and the blood that spills out through his veins feels warm and loved. Niall tugs on Louis’s threadbare UT hoodie and Louis comes easily into the circle of his arms. It’s a “ _Me, too_ ,” Niall knows he doesn’t have to say.

 

*

 

The boys pile into Harry’s truck for a trip to Harry’s and Louis’s favorite fall festival. Niall and Liam get tossed into the truckbed because they’re unlikely to catch a stray wind and go floating away (Zayn) or to upset anyone driving near them (Louis). It’s technically not legal to ride in the back of a truck even though everyone does it anyway, so Harry tells Niall and Liam to stay low till they get out of the city.

Niall absolutely means to, of course, but then Harry picks up speed on I-35 and the sky is that overcast gray that means time stands still and he just can’t not, so he rises unsteadily to his feet. He clings to the wheelhouse and then the truck’s roof for his dear life, but the wind speeds past his face at sixty miles an hour on Austin’s slate gray highway, and Niall laughs. He catches sight of Harry’s face in the rearview mirror. He shakes his head, but there’s a wide, wide smile deepening the dimples on his cheeks.

Barton Hill Farms is a sprawling chunk of farm land broached on all sides by highways. For all that, Niall thinks they could drive right by and never know it was there. Texas is like that, though – all the best bits are hidden away, tucked into the inescapable farm lands and half-lost to time.

As with most outdoor events in Texas, the fall festival is spread over several square acres of farmland. They each shell out fourteen bucks to enter the festival. A tiny stage is faced by rows of hay bales for seating. Beyond that is a great big boat sank more than halfway into the grass, and further on is a cornstalk maze. A vast sea of pumpkins rides the crest of a hill like a wave. A train threads through it all like a gentle amusement park ride. Niall whistles lowly.

Zayn cracks a terrible, “Welcome to the dark side,” that stirs them all into motion.

“What do you want to do first?” Lou asks Harry. “I think we should go maze-pumpkins-petting zoo-snacks-music, because last time we did the petting zoo first and you wouldn’t stop sneezing all day.”

“Fair,” Harry sighs.

They break into teams to see who can get through the maze first, and also because it’s hilariously fun to go running down one of the cornstalk footpaths hollering to each other. Niall and Louis and Zayn don’t try to have a plan cuz that’s what Liam and Harry will surely do, so they haul ass up and down the maze till Niall and Zayn are bent double with their hands on their knees. Louis trots back to them with a feverish glint in his eyes. “Well?” he demands. “We’re not out yet, c’mon, we’ve got to win.”

Niall groans, stands up straight, and follows after. The air tickles his nostrils, it’s so thick with dust and pollen, and the looming sky overhead is still stubbornly gray, but Niall quite likes it. He likes the way time slows down at moments like these. No phones or plans or places to go, not so much as a thought to what he looks like. It’s like if they all forget the world enough, time slips backward a little, and everyone can pretend this moment will last forever.

Zayn, Louis, and Niall stumble out the far end of the maze without quite knowing how they’ve done it. Louis and Zayn break into an absolutely atrocious victory dance that’s all elbows and knees till Niall clears his throat and points at Liam and Harry, who’ve bought a package of kettle corn and sat down on a hay bale to wait for them.

“Cheaters,” Louis huffs, and stalks off to steal a handful of kettle corn from Liam.

Harry looks at Niall and Zayn with hopeful eyes. “You want to go pumpkin picking, don’t you?” Zayn sighs.

“I’m going to paint mine,” Harry says, skipping lightly to his feet. “Last year it came out like shit, to be honest – I wanted to do the three witches from Hocus Pocus. This year it’s going to be very simple. A Thanksgiving turkey.” That doesn’t sound very simple at all, but Niall’s game, so they amble across acres of Texas farmland dedicated to the twang of a banjo and honest-to-God horseshoe tosses and families of all shapes and sizes making memories.

Maura used to do all the pumpkin-selecting from the grocery store down the road from Niall’s house, so he just tags along behind Harry and Zayn. Harry crouches down low and pats his pumpkins like a drum to listen to the sound it makes, sort of like choosing a watermelon, while Zayn is more focused on symmetry. He keeps talking about “the perfect shape” and clucking his tongue.

A cool breeze tickles the back of Niall’s neck. He runs a hand through his hair and pushes his sunglasses back up the bridge of his nose, thinking about the cold beers he’ll have later with Louis watching the SMU vs. Baylor game on the fall festival’s dedicated TV screens, and how he wouldn’t mind walking his fingers up the knobs of Harry’s spine. Harry straightens and turns to look at him, and Niall doesn’t look away fast enough. (He doesn’t really try to.) “We’re here to look at pumpkins, Niall,” Harry says in his smartest voice, “not me.”

“Not me,” Niall echoes. He watches the pleased flush spread further up Harry’s cheeks.

Niall’s not sure how, but one way or another he gets roped into being the one to carry Harry’s pumpkin to the scales for him, and then he waddles it – it must weigh forty or fifty pounds, and it’s not an easy shape to carry – over to the painting booth, where Harry settles in. He actually takes a pumpkin template out of his pocket and unfolds it and Niall falls down laughing. He gets straw in his hair and grass stains on his jeans, and he doesn’t care.

Texas doesn’t do fall colors the way Chicago does; most of the trees are evergreens or just drop all their leaves in a rush when winter hits, and Niall hasn’t had a single bowl of chowder yet, and it’s still warm enough out that he only carries his jean jacket. But autumn is on the air and in his lungs, and it smells like the last headlong rush of the year toward Christmas and New Year’s.

“You alright?” Liam asks, and Niall blinks. “Seemed sort of lost in thought, there.”

“No, yeah,” Niall shrugs, then grins. “Yeah, I’m good.”

Liam shifts on his seat, his beer bottle sweating between his legs. Turns out hay isn’t that uncomfortable to sit on if you’re two beers in and spent on the day. “Hey, you know, my lease is coming up soon. I was thinking, like, you might want your own room. We could go in on another place if you wanted.”

Niall cocks his head. Another place. His name on a real-life lease, with rent and everything. “Yeah?”

“If you want.”

Niall grins. “Yeah, yeah. I’m in, Payno.”

Liam smiles back. His eyes crinkle, and his forehead, and the strange net around Niall’s heart tightens. “Good.”

Niall gets up to get them another round. He brushes off the hay stuck to his ass and queues up at the bar, which is just a bunch of big coolers with heaps of ice and cases of beer. He picks Angry Orchard hard cider because it tastes like fall, ripe apples and the faint bitterness of beer. The clerk pops the caps off for him and Niall takes a sip, letting the carbonation sit on the tip of his tongue.

“That for me?” Zayn asks, materializing out of the darkness with a tip of his head. 

Niall shrugs and hands Liam’s beer over. He can always line up for another bottle, whatever. Time’s running slow as molasses today. “Your, like, bat pumpkin looks fuckin’ awesome, dude.”

Zayn laughs. He tucks his tongue behind his teeth and ducks his head, and that has Niall reaching out to cup the back of his neck with his palm. He reels Zayn in till their foreheads press together. Zayn’s eyelashes send long shadows tickling down his cheeks. “You makin’ a move on me?” Zayn asks casually.

“Yes,” says Niall. “I, like, - I, you know. Shit,” he laughs.

“You love me,” Zayn says, simple as that. “I know. You love Harry too. In a different way.”

Niall’s beginning to feel a bit like a fish caught on the line with the way his heart feels yanked about in his chest. He wonders what happens when he finally gets reeled in.

“Yeah,” says Zayn, as if Niall’s said something profound or insightful. “I’m glad you came along, man,” Zayn says.

Like Niall’s ever had a clue what he was doing. But, like – he swallows – he knows what Zayn means. It’s like he looked up one day and found his life filled to bursting with reasons to be happy.

“Cheers,” Zayn adds. Niall lets him pry the other hard cider bottle out of his grip with a frown, and then Zayn tips his head, and Niall notices Harry lined up at the kettle corn place just down the way. Okay, Niall thinks. From there, it’s an easy matter to tug Harry out of line and into the deep shadows under the shop eaves. Harry takes it as the invitation that it is and kisses Niall soundly. He tastes like autumn in Texas, and they kiss, and kiss, and kiss, and kiss.

 

***

 

Harry promises to cook Thanksgiving dinner if Liam will help him repair his greenhouse, so of course they all make the trip out to Harry’s farm the weekend before. Niall was here just a few days ago for half a bottle of wine and a game of Scrabble they called a tie, but pulling into the driveway never fails to make his heart give a little twinge. He’s given up figuring out what that means.

Liam has his work cut out for him just making sure that nobody’s going to drop a giant pane of glass on their own head or try to climb up on the roof with him, so once he gets that squared away, the renovation becomes fairly straightforward. Niall watches from inside the greenhouse while Harry flutters about plucking weeds and making cuttings, and Zayn kicks his feet up on the countertop and kicks back with his sketchpad, and Louis shouts directions up at Liam from below.

It’s not far from their normal routine of hanging out at a bar on Saturday afternoon to watch a game. Someone will probably suggest ordering a pizza, and they’ll flip a coin to decide who has to go get it. Most likely it’ll be Harry and Niall with the windows rolled all the way down in Harry’s rusted old truck, the wind streaming through their hair, trailing music and laughter. Niall’s looking forward to it, and all the insignificant, beautiful moments in between.

 

*

 

Niall finally gives in and buys something burnt orange to wear for Thanksgiving. It’s just a crewneck sweater from Target, but Harry’s been buzzing all week preparing for dinner. He knows it matters.

“You look handsome,” Louis says, when Niall opens the front door to him Thanksgiving afternoon. He thrusts a bottle of wine into Niall’s arms and adds, “Very handsome, right, Liam?” so Niall groans and rolls his eyes and ushers them inside.

Harry welcomes them with a warm, “Hey, boys,” and hugs that smear flour from the front of his apron onto Liam’s and Louis’s clothes. “Oh,” says Harry, pulling away. “Er, sorry.”

“He already got me, too,” Zayn pipes up from his spot on the sofa.

“You can all have aprons,” Harry says brightly.

Zayn winces and tries, “Oh, no, it’s really okay,” but Harry’s not listening. He ducks into the kitchen to grab each of them an apron, and Niall tells the others in a very terse whisper, “You’ll do it without complaining or so help me God,” that has them all shuffling along with put-upon sighs.

Harry puts a record on, and the sweet sounds of Jackson 5 drift into the toasty kitchen. The turkey is already baking in the oven, and the cranberry sauce is chilling in the fridge. Niall washes the potatoes and sets to peeling them for mash. The room should feel much too small for five of them and all the food, but Niall rather feels like he can’t get the boys close enough. Harry drops a kiss on Niall’s shoulder every time he passes him, and they all muster a rousing chorus of “ABC,” and it’s Niall’s favorite holiday in a long while.

After dinner, and the football game, and the clean-up, Niall finds Harry sitting on the foot of his bed. He smiles when he sees Niall, and Niall goes over to him easily. Harry brings him the rest of the way in with his hands on Niall’s hips; he drags his palms down over Niall’s sides and his stomach admiringly. “I’m a proper Texas boy now,” Niall says, because he still gets a little ruffled when Harry looks at him like that for too long.

Harry plucks at Niall’s sweater. “It’s a good look on you,” he smiles. He pulls on the hem to take it off, and Niall lifts his arms to let him. “This is a good look, too,” Harry adds, so Niall drops into his lap and kisses his smile.

 

***

 

Niall’s sat outside on the curb one Monday morning waiting for Harry to trot up the sidewalk with a box of flowers in his arms. The tree across the street has lost all its leaves seemingly overnight; last Niall looked, it was in the deep green bloom of summer, and now it’s bare and scraggly.

He’s still squinting at it, his head tilted to the side, when Harry shuffles up the street. “What are you looking at?” Harry asks. He sets down the heavy crate of poinsettias on the curb beside Niall and ghosts his fingers along the back of Niall’s neck, a soft, familiar touch.

“That tree. I’m just trying to remember when all the leaves fell off.”

“Oh,” Harry hums. “Yeah, I don’t remember, either.”

“Must’ve been a while ago,” Niall comments, though he’s not really sure.

Harry traces the shell of Niall’s ear with his fingertip like he’s not even aware he’s doing it. “Kinda strange how branches look like roots when all the leaves fall off, huh?”

All of the tugging on Niall’s heart suddenly makes sense. “I’ve been putting down roots,” he says aloud, then blushes.

Harry just looks pleased. “You coming in, then?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Niall jumps up and brushes himself off. “I’ll be right there.”

**Author's Note:**

> comments/kudos mean so much. thank you for reading!!
> 
> (this fic has a [tag](http://niallspringsteen.tumblr.com/tagged/wide_open_spaces/) for ref!)


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